Packaging MP3s for Flash Players

Those who own flash music players may envy the capacity of their brethren who own multi-gigabyte hard drive based music players. News flash: Your envy's misplaced, and you've got the weight and portability advantage. Plus, disk space on a PC costs a whole lot less than disk space on a music player. That's why Ed Tittel explains how to use your PC to stage music collections designed to pour right onto your flash device, to help you make the most of your advantages, too.

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Though most flash MP3 players ship with some kind of software to download
music from your computer to the player, with a little thought and planning you
can make the most of your player's flash capacity, from 64MB to 1GB or
more. With special pricing on larger-capacity flash devices (CF, SD, MMC, and so
forth) bringing prices below $300 per gigabyte (and sometimes below $200),
larger music collections are becoming more affordable.

But no matter what kind of player you've got, you can benefit from
organizing your music and breaking it up into discrete collections designed to
fit whatever amount of memory your player holds. While many techniques are
conceivable, there are two tried-and-true methods that anybody can use.
(Although results will vary according to your MP3 player's support for
standard file formats and filesystem access, either on PCs or Macintoshes.)
Let's label these two methods as follows, and briefly explain how they
work:

Basic file manipulation: For MP3 players that support filesystem
access from PCs (some can be mounted on the desktop like any other storage
device; others have removable flash devices that you can load into low-cost USB-
or FireWire-attached readers), it's easy to create folders or directories
sized to fit specific flash device capacities. Those ins and outs, along with
pros and cons, are covered in the next section.

Playlist control: Most MP3 players work with software that
recognizes playlists (a list of MP3 audio tracks set up for playback, something
like a stack of platters on an old vinyl record player). By carefully crafting
and sizing playlists, it's easy to create collections of music you can
download to an MP3 player's flash memory. Those details, plus pros and
cons, are covered right after the discussion of basic file
manipulation.

Basic File Manipulation

In its most basic form, basic file manipulation works like this: Gather MP3
files into a folder or directory until their aggregate size is slightly less
than or equal to the capacity of the flash device you want to fill with music.
Once assembled, use some kind of file copy utilitysuch as Explorer on
Windows, or File Finder on the Macand copy the files from the hard drive
to your flash device.

To some, this method may sound too good to be true; others may suspect hidden
gotchas. Both sets of cynics would be right in some circumstances. The "too
good to be true" camp will quickly seize on the notion that some MP3
players don't support filesystem access. For such players, that makes this
approach more a case of "can't get there from here"or
really, can't get here (MP3 player) from there (PC or Macintosh). Even
those whose MP3 players support filesystem access should recognize that
there's a world of difference between grabbing and using MP3 files from a
filesystem perspective and doing so from inside a jukebox program, music
manager, or playlist utility.

But for those hardy souls prepared to dig into opaque filenames and persist
in recognizing the music inside individual MP3 files, this approach provides a
simple, straightforward way to prepare music collections for flash memory play.
All you need to do is follow these steps:

Create a folder or directory on a hard disk with sufficient free
space.

Name the folder or directory descriptively.
Best-of-Miles-1972-1979 works a lot better than New Folder,
for example.

It's hard to beat a cheapo flash readersuch as the EDGE 6-in-1
Flash Media Reader 2.0 available through Computer Shopper for as little as
$10for ease of access and convenience for those MP3 players with removable
memory whose file formats also work with same.